Tuesday, August 16, 2005

FFS, what a few weeks I've had.  Yeah, I know ... whine some more please.  :p  My home PC died 2 weeks ago when I drove over to the library to pick up Harry Potter.  I came home 10 minutes later to a black screen --- not an encouraging sign.  Of course, out of all the PCs in my house, this was the best one.  I tried switching out the video card.  Nada.  I tried all kinds of diagnostics. which basically just said "Hi you're fucked!".  The next day, I called the place that built this but they were closed on Saturday.  I got brave & desperate and went to CompUSA to buy a new hard drive.  $200 & 300 GB later, I still was fucked.  I finally disconnected everything after hours of fiddling and called it quits.  On Monday, I took my PC with the new HD to the original place.  They said my HD was full of bad sectors.  They also sold me a cheaper (and smaller) one than CompUSA, added more memory, fans, and got me set up.  When I asked if they could slave my broken HD into it to see if I could retrieve any files, I was told it wouldn't boot with it hooked up.  Wow!

I hate hardware issues.  I'm so challenged.   :\

So by mid-week, I had my PC back and needed to reinstall everything and try to recover what data I could.  Fortunately, this is published on the web, so I could copy and paste it.  I lost some data, but I look at it as a housecleaning.

One day later, I had my HD replaced in my work laptop and went through the whole stressful process again.  Of course this time I had warning so everything was backed up to the minute, but it still sucks.  Also, my email wouldn't synchronize properly so I had to call my Help Desk and troubleshoot that for 2 days until I got fed up and started raising my voice.  Grrr, it was a simple fix finally that they said was a known problem.  HINT:  If you have a known problem, try that first.  Sigh.

So basically I've been mucking around reinstalling software & tweaking my settings for weeks now.  I'm almost comfortable again, and I have pretty new backgrounds.  =)